Humanities, National Programme, or trust in crisis?

Abstract

The reader is reminded of the original idea behind the National Programme for the Development of Humanities (Polish abbr.: NPRH), as an institution providing an additional source of funding for projects in the field of humanities. While the scheme is of use to the humanities milieu, it is rather apparent that it undermines the rules of Polish science financing as provided in the Laws of 2010 (envisioning no direct influence from the Minister of Knowledge on funding research projects). This distinctness, along with a number of other, less considerable, circumstances makes the Programme incomparable with the National Science Centre (NCN), which
is an independent agency. The National Programme’s raison d’Ltre is that it has to be, and remain, completely dissimilar to the NCN, both in substantive (the competitions held ought to
cover the fields other than funded by the Centre) and organisational terms (the actions taken should essentially be based on milieu-centred conciliation and agreement, rather than overly extended bureaucratic structures).